The garden about the Opera

In M., I sometimes traversed half the city by foot in order to kill time. There were no public spaces, besides the Starbucks-spinoffs where the cheapest drink on the menu was $3, a travesty even by New York standards. So I had to keep moving.

There was a pretty garden near the New Opera. It was called Sad Ermitazh. Of course, for most of the year it was too cold to frequent its benches.

In late April, after several false alarms, the thaw dispersed, and it became dry and sunny enough to sit outside in half-hour stints. I would walk to the garden after class at the Russian State Humanities University, and read. All year I had kept a strict regime of Russian; in late May, I bought a cheap paperback edition of Bleak House. There were some typos, but otherwise the thing was rich. I read it in timid installments, acquainting myself with English after a long separation.

Adjacent to the Opera, there was a restaurant with outdoor seating; the speakers broadcast American radio. One day they played Dido's "White Flag," a fact that made it into my journal. There was a lady who sold ice-cream in that park; nearly every passerby was her customer. She always lamented the presence of young lovers. "Good for them," she said, "but after all, there are children here!" The occasional cop did not reprimand the passionates; he only checked to make sure their shoes did not sully the bench.

The Opera itself did a stunning production of La Traviata, which I saw twice that year, once with Margalit in the fall, and again with Masha, Stuart, and Eirik in the spring. That same week we also saw Norma. I remember I was reading Sholem Aleichem's Marienbad in Russian translation then, to temper Dickens. It was a novel in letters.

I was surprised to find that my friends liked Norma better than Traviata.

I can't say why but I felt that opera was my inheritance to share. So it was my sweet victory to see Onegin with them in Piter during the May holidays. I had burned everyone a copy of the full music, after spending a week comparing the opera to Pushkin's original text, making notes of the main arias, choruses, and golden moments. Walking back to the hostel in that white night, they sang in Russian from Onegin: "Habit is given to us from above," and later, "Onegin, I beg you to leave me be," and even, "Shut up, or I shall kill you."